This blog first appeared in the Guardian development blog on 5 October 2014 (see article here) It is rare to witness a paradigm shift in refugee protection. But such a shift has just happened with the release of UNHCR’s new Policy on Alternatives to Camps. For refugees and refugee advocates who have been shouting for…
June 20th marked United Nations World Refugee Day. In Senegal, IRRI marked its commitment to promoting and protecting the human rights of asylum-seekers, refugees, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) by raising awareness among both the authorities and the Senegalese public of the conditions of refugees and of their rights under the 1951 United Nations (UN)…
(This blog first appeared on the International Justice Monitor, a project of the Open Society Justice Initiative.) On June 27, a Dutch court refused the appeal of three former the International Criminal Court (ICC) witnesses, Floribert Ndjabu Ngabu, Sharif Manda Ndadza Dz’Na, and Pierre-Célestin Mbodina Iribi, for asylum in the Netherlands. The witnesses, who were previously in…
This blog first appeared on the International Justice Monitor, a project of the Open Society Justice Initiative. On May 23, the International Criminal Court (ICC) handed down a 12-year prison sentence to the convicted Congolese militia leader Germain Katanga. Despite what was seen as a light sentence to some, it was not greeted with surprise…
This blog first appeared on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/lucy-hovil/consequences-of-exclusion-in-sudan) The story of one individual can bring home the realities of living under a repressive regime that otherwise seem intangible. The recent story of Meriam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag, a Sudanese woman who has been sentenced to death by a court in Sudan for adultery and “apostasy”, highlights one…
For thirty two years, the armed conflict in Casamance, which has pitted the government of Senegal against separatist rebels of the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC), remains unresolved and the civilians displaced by it remain vulnerable. The MFDC rebellion, which is one of the oldest in Africa, is calling for the independence of…
Meriam Ibrahim, a 27-year-old Sudanese woman currently pregnant with her second child, is facing punishments of public flogging and execution if found guilty on baseless charges of apostasy and adultery in an upcoming hearing to be convened by Sudan’s Criminal Court at the Haj Yousif court complex in Khartoum, Sudan. SIHA is calling for urgent…
On Friday, March 7, 2014, Trial Chamber II at the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted, by a majority, Germain Katanga as an accessory to four war crimes (murder, attacking a civilian population, destruction of property, and pillaging) and one crime against humanity (murder). While some welcomed the verdict, reactions to the decision focused as much…
The verdict in the case against Germain Katanga, the alleged commander of the Forces de Résistance Patriotique en Ituri (FRPI), for war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to an attack on the village of Bogoro in Ituri, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is being awaited with impatience in Ituri. Having followed trials at the…
South Sudan is currently on the edge. Reports of an alleged attempted coup in South Sudan on Sunday 15 December were followed by days of reports of firefights all over the capital Juba. On December 19, these were followed by the news that the town of Bor in Jonglei state has fallen to rebel forces…
This blog was first posted by the Open Society Justice Initiative. In the early morning hours of November 24, police in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) arrested Fidèle Babala Wandu, a member of the DRC Parliament and Deputy Secretary General of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) (the party of Jean-Pierre Bemba)…
(This blog first appeared in Politico.It has been republished with permission from the author.) The debate around the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Africa is one that has polarised the continent, with equal-opportunity-mud being slung at African countries and the African Union (AU), as well as the ICC and the international community. Among the myriad…
Ali Agab is a Sudanese human rights activist As I decided to put these thoughts on paper, I remembered Dr John Garang’s aphorism, “there is no smoke without fire, except in Sudan.” Despite the enormous efforts of Sudanese pro-democracy and justice activists, the Inghaz regime (under which Bashir has ruled Sudan since 1989, first as…
(The writer is the Director of the Strategic Initiative for women in the Horn of Africa. The article first appeared in the Sudan Tribune on 23 September 2013 and has been reproduced with permission from the author.) Anger is growing in Sudan as peaceful demonstrators are being injured and killed by the Sudanese regime forces. This…
Kenya has paid an excruciatingly heavy price for its regional position in the struggle against Islamic militants. The horror of what has just taken place in Nairobi’s exclusive Westgate shopping mall is both hard to comprehend and dreadfully predictable. It is hard to comprehend for lots of reasons, not least the cruelty of what has…
Just when we thought that our neighbour, Tanzania, was about to rethink its current policy of expelling other nationals from its soil, another problem came up. The latest news coming out of Tanzania is that some 25,000 Burundians were summarily rounded up and told to go back to Burundi. In addition, apparently 10,000 teachers from…
As the General Assembly came together last week to engage in an informal dialogue on the latest report of the UN Secretary-General on the Responsibility to Protect: State Responsibility and Prevention, the ongoing commission of genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes (known collectively as “atrocity crimes”) in Syria, Sudan and the Democratic…
Today, the UN General Assembly is having a dialogue to discuss the Secretary-General’s latest report on the implementation of the responsibility to protect – otherwise known as R2P. The idea behind the responsibility to protect – which effectively affirms the responsibility of states to protect populations within their borders from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes…
It is with sadness and anger that I report the death of a young Oromo in Kaliti prison, Ethiopia, on 24 August, yesterday. Tesfahun Chemeda was a student activist in Ethiopia and a political activist among refugees in Kenya, where he was granted refugee status by UNHCR. He was arrested with a colleague, Mesfin Abebe,…
On 30th June this year, the day of the cessation of their refugee status, one and a half thousand Rwandan refugees crowded into the Lusaka Anglican Cathedral in a church service organised by Zambian church leaders to hear the Minister of Home Affairs reaffirm that they could continue to make their home in Zambia. The…
